May 24 2008
Top ten current trends in online journalism
I think we are well past the point where online journalism is a trend in journalism. Time to be a little more discerning and take a look at what’s important, right now, in online journalism. I’ll divide it up into three sections: Gathering the News, Augmenting the News and Delivering the News.
Gathering the News
Mobile Journalism: The Rise of the Mojo
Wikipedia says use of the term Mojo to describe a Mobile Journalist was coined only 3 years ago. Now there are conferences that include mojo, blogs on mojo, and Reuters has a standard mojo kit. Here’s an entry level mojo kit for students. I think the kits should include GPS-enabled cameras or camera phones so that photos can be automatically geotagged from the field. Some kits include a laptop, but as the Reuters kit demonstrates, it doesn’t have to be that expensive.
This is important from a two angles. First, it emphasizes the fact that reporters are expected to bring back more than text stories from the field – we also want pictures, sound and video. And we want them fast, like instantly. Second, as reporters cut the tethers to their desks, media organizations can start to get rid of the desks. I expect to see a rise in the use of freelance journalists who work from home or “the field” and work for more than one news org. Sort of a citizen journalist meets professional scenario.
Social Networking
Reporters are reaching out to their networks on their blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook for help in writing stories. Jeff Jarvis calls Twitter the “canary in the news coalmine.”
It stands to reason: If you’ve just gone through such a major event, you are sure to want to update your friends about it. If enough people are all chattering about an earthquake at the same time, that’s a good and immediate indication of a major news story. Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake†and “evacuationâ€.
This is important in a couple of ways. First, it recognizes – and even institutionalizes – the idea that reporters will not be the first on the scene. It gives them a new tool to get news faster and from more angles and more sources. Second, it’s a way to reach out and connect to the very people who will be reading your stuff, allowing them to help you shape it and target it. Also known as crowdsourcing.
RSS Filtering
Note I’m not just talking about using RSS to gather news. Paul Bradshaw said just a couple months ago that using RSS was one of the main trends in journalism. But I think that is already old. Instead, I’m talking about new ways to filter your feeds. As anybody will soon find when they have lots of feeds plugged into their feed readers, the flood of information can be debilitating. We need new ways to beat that down into something manageable. Here’s a few.
The kingdaddy of this is Yahoo! Pipes. It’s a little more technical than using the other filtering services, but not by much. You don’t have to know how to program. And it’s more flexible. Here’s a how-to to get started with Pipes.
This is important because journalists not only need to know how to find leads and information, but be able to do it more quickly and efficiently than anyone else. That’s the new race.
Paul Bradshaw calls using RSS and Social Media together Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering.
Churnalism
I’ve written before about the nastiness of many news outlets re-using wire or PR copy without adding new value or even doing basic fact-checking. It clogs up the Google News results, and it could damage the credibility of the news outlet if they don’t check facts in their race to be early with the story. But worst of all, it provides zero benefit for us, the poor readers, and very little benefit (even harm) for the news outlet. More companies should practice Link Journalism. Yes, outgoing links are Good For You®. News companies should be using wire copy strictly to augment their news gathering, as leads and information about new stories they could do; they should not be dumping them up on their websites just Because They Can®.
British journalist Nick Davies calls the practice ‘churnalism’, and worries that the media “are likely to engage in the mass production of ignorance because the corporations and the accountants who have taken us over have stripped out our staffing, increased our output and ended up chaining us to our desks.”
Scott Karp says “…each version of the story reduces that marginal economic value of all the others.”
Google says it has made changes back in August 2007 that would remove duplicate stories, but if a news org changes the story even slightly (for example, to match its own publication style guide) then it will still appear on Google News even though it is essentially identical content. So it’s still a problem.
This is important because companies have to decide whether they are in business to produce new content or whether they are in business to aggregate content. See the sections on aggregation and news as a platform below. The successful resolution of this issue will determine who is thinking properly about their business model and who is not, and will be good for the consumers of news.
Augmenting the News
Geotagging and Maps
News outlets should be geotagging their stories and photos. It’s easy enough to do. I developed a system a couple of years ago for parrysound.com whereby the web operator, as she was uploading a story, could click and name locations mentioned in the story on a Google map. The lat/longs were then saved in the database and Google maps could be generated for the story. Only one or two stories were ever so tagged, though, because the idea never caught on with my manager and the people uploading the stories were not required to do it. And because it did take a little bit of extra time, and no-one saw the value of it, it never got done.
But there are more and more good reasons for doing it. Aside from the pretty maps you can place on your own site with your tagged data, you can now syndicate your news onto sites that take geotagged news stories and put them on maps – but only if you’re in the States, so far. Two such sites of note are EveryBlock and Outside.In. Why would you want to do that? Because you want your news published in as many places as possible. Please see News as a Platform below.
EveryBlock has a nice blog where you can learn lots of stuff about mapping and geotagging, and one of the EveryBlock guys has written a nice tutorial on how to do your own maps so you don’t have to rely on Google Maps.
Why is this important? Because aside from the time of an event, the location of the event is probably the most important piece of metadata you can share. And aside from the beautiful map interfaces you could put on your own site, you could syndicate your data to other sites that map the news.
The Semantic Web
It’s been slow to get going, but some recent developments have me thinking that the news is going to kickstart the semantic web. Some news organizations are starting to put meta-information in their news stories. First and foremost is the Thompson Reuters Calais semantic markup API. The system “can help fuel the bottom-up approach [to the semantic web] by combing unstructured data and spitting out structured tags.” A plug-in has been developed for Wordpress to help bloggers tag their content in a structured way, and the API will allow publishers to build structured tags into their content management systems. That should help make it easy for the web people at news companies to start tagging their content.
Additionally, as mentioned above, there are websites which will take stories that have been geotagged and aggregate them into maps. This should provide some incentive for publishers to start adding some metadata – namely geographic location – to their stories, which is the beginning of semantic tagging and also the beginning of seeing their news as a platform.
It won’t be long before every story is published with properly formatted semantic data. At first it will be lat/longs for the main event covered in the story, then it will be properly formatted time data for the event, the original publication date, and the last-edited date. Then it will be tags for every person, named entity, location etc that is in the story. At that point it will become very easy for people to build all kinds of things – personal biographies, lists of a person’s quotes for the past week, a timeline or history of a particular building or place or technology or organization, all on top of news that is being published routinely on semantically-enabled CMSs.
But I wax. The important thing is that it’s the news that will finally kickstart the semantic web.
Multimedia
And I don’t mean video and pics. Well, I don’t JUST mean video and pics. I mean all kinds of PowerPoints and Word Documents and charts and graphs and videos and pics that you place on specialized sites for those types of things and then embed them back on your own site. And others can embed them on their sites too. That’s right…others can embed them on their sites too.
That’s the way we did video when I was with parrysound.com. We uploaded them to YouTube and then put a nice interface on the site to sort through them. Other people could upload videos to YouTube and tell us about them, and we’d link those up too. Other people could embed our videos (not that they ever did, mind you). And we’d get some traffic from YouTube itself.
I see they’ve blown that up over there, back to hosting videos themselves in a truly ugly interface. Losing all that extra traffic and creating extra time for programmers and editors and using up server storage space and with no way to embed them onto other sites. Oh well. In fact, if I was to do parrysound.com again now, I’d probably even have all our pictures loaded up to Flickr, grouped into albums based on the print edition, with geotagging, then embedded back into our own site into stories and into albums. Why not? We get some Flickr traffic, we don’t have to host the pics ourselves, etc.
This is important for two reasons: you can embed different kinds of content into your news stories without much extra work for programmers, and you can take a step toward acting like a platform. See the next section.
Delivering the News
News as a Platform
Jeff Jarvis coined the phrase “thinking like a platform” with more explanation here. Make your news (and your multimedia, see above) embeddable onto other sites. Open up your news with APIs, like Reuters did. Let others build cool things out of your news. Let other people make money from your news. It’s OK, really. You’ll still make your money. In fact, you’ll make more, because more people will see your news. You’ll win converts. You’ll make friends. You’ll start new relationships. You’ll learn to count success in terms other than raw hits to your website and clicks on your (oh so 90’s) banner ads.
This is important because it’s a whole new shiny way of thinking. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee says, “It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.”
Aggregation
What’s new about this – places like Google News and Topix have been aggregating news for years, right? Well now, some companies are welcoming it and encouraging and making it easier for other people to aggregate their content and use it in new ways. Like Reuters. And the New York Times.
Plus, aggregators are starting to be more interesting as well. This one from Holland lets you visualize the flow of news over the last 24 hours. It also lets its users edit and augment news stories in wiki-like fashion. I’ve already mentioned the ones that localize aggregated content and put it on maps. Lots more interesting ideas to come, I’m sure, as the semantic web starts to take off.
Search
Ok, this one’s not really a hot topic right now, but it should be. Fifteen years in to the web and many news companies still don’t have a decent search. These guys just won an international award and they’re still using a Google search. It can’t be monetized and it can’t be categorized. Sorry to keep tooting my own horn, but look at this example from ParrySound.com: look how all the different databases are pulled in. And look how two businesses show up right in the search results – and yes, they paid for that.
Summary
A lot of these things are interconnected and can’t happen/couldn’t have happened without each other. They become possible only as the technology rises to the task.
This is my take on what’s important in online news right now. And yeah, I mentioned Reuters four times.
Update May 26, 2008: Yes, sometimes I am incredibly, awesomely prescient. This just out today.
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[...] Writing on his Printed Matters blog, Burden has used his experience as a news website consultant to put together his Top Ten Current Trends In Online Journalism. [...]